Orion Health launches Rhapsody 4

New Zealand’s Orion Health has announced the launch of the latest version of its integration engine, Rhapsody 4.

Orion says the latest version of Rhapsody focuses on providing greater support for the latest industry trends, technologies and standards, including secure web services, already adopted by groups such as HL7 and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise.

Paul de Bazin, Rhapsody product manager said the solution now provides greater support and features for organisations using service oriented architecture (SOA) to solve their integration challenges.

“Healthcare institutions are recognising the value of using integration tools to provide simple, reusable components – but they also require those components to be healthcare specific.”

He said the latest version of Rhapsody builds on almost 20 years of healthcare integration, and supports the latest standards required for interoperability.”

Orion Health collaborated with over 100 customers, partners and vendors in the beta testing program for the Rhapsody integration engine.

The company said this testing program enabled Rhapsody to be tested in diverse situations to ensure the product would meet the highest performance, reliability and usability standards.

In April this year, Orion Health signed a global partnership agreement for Philips to deploy Rhapsody Integration Engine across its portfolio of healthcare informatics solutions.

Dale Wiggins, chief technology officer, patient care and clinical informatics, for Philips Healthcare said “Rhapsody 4’s new features, particularly around web services, security, and built-in lookup tables, are important advances. We look forward to using these capabilities to help us achieve our integration goals”.

In the UK, NHS Connecting for Health recently successfully used Rhapsody as a common middleware layer in a project involving nine vendors testing discharge summaries as part of the their ‘interoperability tool kit’ proof of concept.

“Whilst we were able to successfully implement the ITK standards using the previous version of Rhapsody, the new features available in the latest version will aid development, reducing the complexity and development time for new interfaces” said Gary McCormack, senior programmer at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

In another proof of concept project, Rhapsody was used to implement the messaging service for a federated information exchange in Europe.

Configuration of a centralised messaging service in a federated Health Information Exchange can be performed quickly and using Rhapsody, it was proven that timely responses to queries are possible using distributed sources.

Key features of the latest version of Rhapsody include managed look-up tables for code system translations and other conversions. The integration now also includes advanced monitoring options with a new secure monitoring API and programmatic interface

Other features include simplified web-based interfaces for monitoring and archive browsing; and a drag-and-drop user interface designed specifically for the interface analyst.

Orion Health has more than 1,000 clients around the world including the New Zealand Ministry of Health and Auckland Regional District Health Boards; NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board; ACT Health and New South Wales Health, Australia; Health Infoway, Canada; and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.